


troll 2: brent lived and this is what happens 30 years later

by ThresherShark



Category: Troll 2 (1990), Troll 2 - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-19 12:17:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22444207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThresherShark/pseuds/ThresherShark
Summary: After the events of Troll 2, Holly and Elliot wound up married, and Joshua a recluse. Elliot runs into his assumed-deceased friend Brent, who he left in Nilbog 30 years ago.
Relationships: Elliot Cooper/Brent
Kudos: 1





	troll 2: brent lived and this is what happens 30 years later

**Author's Note:**

> Look guys. In the movie Troll 2 (1990), Brent is last seen spitting out Creedence's popcorn in the RV. He is not sweating green. There was no green stuff on the corn. Brent lived and they just left him there.

Troll 2 Fic : Brent Lives

It had been a long time since Elliot Cooper last stepped foot in the state of Utah. Life had swept the aging man away from his home state, and it was welcomed. The place he grew up in may as well have been a ghost town, what with all the memories of his long-deceased friends haunting it. Drew, Brent, and Arnold had all died nearly thirty years ago, and Elliot had never forgiven himself.  
Looking at the old schoolyard, he could see past the new playground equipment, to a vision of the boys he’d spent his every day with, playing together happily. Then the faces of their parents when he had to tell them that he didn’t think they were coming back from Nilbog, the rural community they’d been visiting. He didn’t think much of it at the time, Arnold then Drew going missing, but after all that happened with the goblins, he assumed the worst. Holly, his girlfriend at the time and present-day wife, had demanded he come with her, and he left Brent alone in the RV he wouldn’t return to.  
Holly was not a gentle sort of girl, and Elliot figured he should have left her when she asked him to choose between her and his friends. Deep down he knew he didn’t spend enough time with her as her boyfriend and assumed he would be able to placate her by giving her the attention she asked for. She would have calmed down, and he would be allowed to hang out with the boys. But when he made his choice, it was final. He left Brent alone. And when Holly’s mother was killed upon getting home, Elliot’s fate was sealed. The trauma of the goblin attack and his support for her following it had forged a bond too strong to break over any petty little thing. Her father stopped trying to push him away, overcome with grief for his wife, and there were no boys for Holly to compete with.  
Now Mr. Michael Waits was growing old. He moved houses, but stayed in town. Joshua, nearly forty years old, never moved out. He didn’t want Holly to move out either, but they assumed he would grow out of it, and the trauma would ease with age, but in some respects, it only grew worse. The man was as paranoid as they came, but no one in the family could blame him. Despite his nervous demeanor, he made a good uncle… apart from the times he reinforced the goblin phobias he instilled in Elliot’s children. Elliot recalled checking under the bed for monsters in his son’s university dorm room. Not a great look for the roommate.  
Elliot finally reached the grocery store. He was only there to pick up a few things for Mr. Waits, reusable shopping bag neatly tucked under his arm, ready to be filled with sweet, sweet, non-vegetarian goodness. Elliot’s hand reached for a tray of bacon, when another hand touched his.  
“Oh sorry,” the other man started, but stopped, furrowing his brow when their eyes met "do I know you? You look...”  
Breaking the eye-contact at first, assuming he must have been a classmate or something, Elliot picked up two trays to hand one to him. “Elliot Cooper, I lived here as a boy.”  
“Oh my God.”  
“What?”  
“Elliot, it’s me. Brent.”  
Elliot looked closer this time. It was Brent, thirty years older, and without the mullet, but still Brent. “Brent?! But that’s impossible, you… you died in Nilbog!”  
“What are you talking about? Were you trying to kill me, leaving me alone in that RV? Jesus Elliot, I know that girl of yours told you to choose, but I didn’t think you were just going to straight-up leave me in the woods for a week!”  
“You stayed there a whole week?!” There was a lot to unpack in Brent’s statement, but that last bit was both the easiest to process and hardest to believe “All the food there was poisoned!”  
“Hell no, this corn witch freaked me out so I drove to the nearest town marked on the map. I left you a note but I never heard from you again!” Brent had gone from shocked to upset. Still, the easiest part to process was the hardest to believe.  
“Corn witch?! What corn witch?!” Elliot soon noticed the other people in the grocery store staring.  
As if thinking the same thing, Brent stopped himself “Look, we’re making a scene. I want to talk to you though. How about you stop by my apartment later?”  
“Yeah Brent, that sounds good,” Elliot agreed, nodding repeatedly, and the other began writing down his address on his shopping list “I can’t believe it’s really you, I…” His voice dropped to silence when his old friend handed him the paper.  
“Eight o’clock?”  
“Yeah. I’ll be there.” The two started to walk to keep shopping, but in the same direction. Elliot quickly turned to go the other way, nearly slipping on the store floor as he went.

“You’re not going to believe who I found at the grocery store!” Elliot announced, setting the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter.  
“Madonna?” Michael asked dryly, looking over the rim of his reading glasses.  
“Bologna?” Joshua tried, walking into the kitchen.  
“No, and yes, but no,” Elliot told them, handing Josh the bologna he bought and glancing over to Holly who was filling out some kind of form at the table. She looked up at him, sensing his gaze. “I found Brent.”  
“Brent?” the others asked, his wife sounding somewhat less enthused than he’d like her to be.  
“Brent, my friend we lost in Nilbog! He was at the store, I’m going to meet him and catch up tonight.” By the end of the sentence, Elliot’s voice had tightened. The Waits family did not like to bring up what happened at Nilbog, and their faces showed why. But there was something else. Elliot was nervous about talking to Brent about what had happened. Facing his guilt was hard enough, but to hear any blame Brent might put on him… tonight was going to hurt. A lot.  
To his surprise, Holly seemed reluctant to grant him permission to see the man. He hadn’t left her company for the boys in thirty years, and he wasn’t going to roll over on it today. And she knew better than to ask him to. “Okay. But you’re missing Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.”  
“I’ll manage.” In a subconscious effort to make it up to her, he walked over and kissed her forehead.

After supper, Elliot checked the address on Google, and left for the liquor store. Most men like nothing more than a case of beer as an apology, after all. Once there though, he realized he didn’t know what Brent liked best. He’d spent three decades considering this man his best friend without even knowing him. He second-guessed the beer and went for a bottle of red wine. Less juvenile, more formal.  
This may have been the wrong decision, he soon thought, faced with the resulting situation. Two men alone in an apartment with a bottle of wine. It felt a little gay without his wife there, not that she ever made him feel less gay about his friends, with all the accusations she made when they were still alive.  
“You didn’t have to do that, Elliot.” Brent took the wine with a puzzled expression.  
“Sorry, I didn’t know what you like,” Elliot tried to joke “I haven’t seen you since we were young enough to take what we could get…”  
Brent smiled and nodded, but there was a sadness to it. Elliot followed him over to the couch, sitting next to him. There was no other clear furniture in the room, the nearby armchair covered in a stack of papers.  
“Look Brent, I’m really sorry about what happened,” he said it immediately, he needed to get it off his chest “I’m sorry for bringing you, I’m sorry we lost the others, I’m sorry I left you. You’re right, I didn’t go back to the RV. Fuck. I was with the Waits, we got attacked by goblins, and we got out of there as fast as we could. I’m so sorry.”  
“… Goblins?” Brent asked, incredulous.  
“Uh… yeah? Everyone in Nilbog was a goblin?”  
Brent glanced around his apartment as if he were going to find a hidden camera. He had to ask again. “Goblins?”  
“C’mon, Brent, Nilbog is goblin spelled backwards, dammit! What were you talking about before, a corn witch?” Despite that they were apparently not on the same page here, Elliot was laughing a little, head in his hands.  
Brent could feel the ice breaking too. Thirty years may have gone by, but Elliot was still his friend. “Okay, okay, I’ll go first. I figured you’d be back later, and well, you knew Arnold and Drew, we thought we were tough, I wouldn’t have known where to look for them anyway…”  
Elliot nodded quietly, taking from that sentence that Brent never found them either.  
“I was watching TV, then the program changed to this woman. She said she was outside, and it looked like the woods outside, so I checked, and there she was.”  
“That’s terrifying,” Elliot’s brows went up.  
“Well, you know, young and dumb…” Brent broke eye contact, turning to face the wall in front of them. “She had this… corn cob…”  
“… What the hell did you do?!” Elliot couldn’t help but to raise his voice and lean towards Brent, who covered his face with his hands and doubled over.  
“Not much!”  
“Brent!”  
“She seduced me!”  
“With corn?!”  
“You don’t get to judge me, you ran off with Holly after she punched you so hard you fell down!” Brent jabbed back, but realized his mistake “… Sorry. I guess, we were both kind of stupid back then.”  
Elliot nodded “Yeah, it’s okay, you’re right. But still, a corn witch?”  
“Yeah it was weird, one minute she was doing this corn stuff, the next the whole RV is filled with popcorn!” Brent described “No one believes me, it was just, out of nowhere. And then she was gone. I caught a glimpse of her as she was leaving, I heard her wail… her face was suddenly terrible.”  
“Wait, was she like, a pale, thin woman?”  
“Yeah!”  
“Dressed in black, big necklace?”  
“That’s her! You saw her too?” Brent sat upright again.  
“Yeah, but uh, she was not hot, buddy,” Elliot chuckled “Mrs. Waits called her Creedence, she seemed to be a leader of the goblins.”  
“Goblins…” Brent still seemed baffled by this, but refused to be distracted from his story “After she left, I just got freaked out, left you guys a note and drove away. Stayed out by another town in case she came back, and waited there for the rest of the week.”  
“And there was no green paste on the corn, right?”  
“Green paste?”  
“They had this… poisoned food, it looked normal apart from the green paste.”  
Brent shook his head “I didn’t see any paste.”  
Elliot leaned back, thinking. “She must not have had the time to finish you off then. If it was dark, the rest of us were probably attacking Stonehenge.”  
“… What?”  
“I’ll get to it later. What happened next? How didn’t I see you again?” Elliot waved off Stonehenge’s involvement in the story as if it weren’t batshit.  
“When I got back, my parents were freaking out, they thought I’d died. Arnold and Drew’s parents had the police still looking for them in Nilbog… I tried to contact you but… Well, Holly got to me first and told me to back off, your parents never liked me so I didn’t ask them. I just kind of assumed I’d see you again anyway, but… after a while it felt like you were ignoring me,” Brent admitted.  
“… Holly knew you were okay?” Horror spread across Elliot’s face like warm molasses.  
“Oh Jesus Christ, she didn’t even tell you? Man, that girl was a bitch,” Brent gripped the arm of his sofa, frustrated. It disgusted him that she would do that.  
“… Holly’s my wife.”  
Silence filled the room. Brent almost said sorry, but he didn’t owe an apology. The only sorry he had was a condolence. Elliot tried to hold back a sob, feeling betrayed.  
“Hey, El, I…” Brent moved closer, but he didn’t know what to say.  
Crying, Elliot gave his side of the story. “When I got back to the house with the Waits, the whole town was there. They tried to make us eat the food, but Josh and the ghost of Mrs. Waits’ father stopped them, and we saw that they were all goblins in disguise… Then we did a séance to bring back ghost grandpa, and Josh vanished, but grandpa gave him a bologna sandwich, and we thought we destroyed Stonehenge, but when we got back, the food in their house was poisoned and Mrs. Waits got eaten…”  
“… What? And you thought my corn witch story was crazy? You’re crying, Elliot, did you leave out any details?”  
Sniffling, Elliot nodded “they were doing a house exchange, that’s how the goblins got into their fridge.”  
That was not what Brent was looking for.  
“And with her mother gone, Holly was really out of sorts, I had to comfort her every day, and when she cried, I…” Elliot was crying harder now, breaking down. Brent put his hand on his back in support “I cried too. I was crying for you! But I couldn’t let her know that!” With that, Elliot crumpled, falling into Brent’s lap as though they’d kept in touch the last three decades.  
Brent stroked Elliot’s hair as he cried, resent for Holly bubbling in his stomach.  
“Fuck, Brent, I just spent most of my life on her. God. I thought I was being smart, you know? Fuck, she always made me feel like I was making the mature choice being with her. Man up, support your woman, raise your kids, get a house, no guy friends, no sleepovers, no…”  
“Sleepovers are gay,” Brent said, in a mock teen-Holly imitation “stop sleeping with your friends!”  
A laugh escaped Elliot, wiping some of his tears away with his wrist and sitting back up, sniffling once. “Look at me, a straight man in the year 2020. Got any tissues?”  
“Here.”  
“Thanks.”  
Brent took the moment to look Elliot over. He was greyed, and larger than before, but still had his same bright eyes and lop-sided smile. “It was the 90s, El, we were all in a rush to prove ourselves straight.”  
“That why you got it on with a corn witch?” Elliot asked jokingly, trying to lighten the mood.  
“Nah, corn witch was hot,” Brent snorted “I might have been rushing into it though.”  
“Might.”  
“Shut up,” Brent nudged him, laughing.  
“I should have broke things off with Holly. I should have done it before that vacation, but I should have done it after too. It just was never the time. Her mother died, then… it was like there was never a good enough reason to end it after all we went through. It’s just the little things, her anger, how controlling she is, her insistence I be as tough as her about things when she can lift me like a sack of potatoes…”  
“She still lifts?”  
“Ohhh yeah.”  
“Good for her, I guess, but you really should… get a divorce. I hate to say it, but you just seem so damaged by all of this.”  
Elliot nodded, then shook his head “I don’t know. It was a long time ago; she must have just… not been able to bring it up since.”  
Brent sat up straighter.  
“I must sound pretty dumb, huh. There’s just a lot going on, I didn’t even tell you about our kids, or anything.”  
“Ooh, you have Mini-Coopers?” Brent accepted the topic change, knowing it was not appropriate to push anything.  
Elliot nodded “All grown up now.”

The two men talked long into the night, catching up, drinking the wine, and losing track of time.  
“Ah, shit, is it really one in the morning?” Elliot swore, seeing the time on his phone when Holly texted him to ask where he was.  
“Oh shit, yeah. Sorry.”  
“Not your fault. Think I drank too much to drive though. Uhg.”  
“Stay over. We’ve been deprived of thirty years of sleepovers,” Brent offered, albeit jokingly.  
“Do grown men have sleepovers?” Elliot asked, but realized that that sounded gay, so he shifted the focus “Damn, I wish Arnold and Drew were here. I don’t even know what exactly happened to them.”  
“Me neither. Investigation turned up nothing.”  
Elliot sighed, and texted Holly that he’d be back in the morning. He pictured her at her father’s house, at the table with him and her brother, and a bulb lit up in his head.  
“We should try a séance!” Elliot was on his feet in a flash “It worked for Grandpa Seth, maybe we could get in contact with them! Do you have any candles?”  
“Well, aren’t we stuck in the 80s!” Brent exclaimed, getting off the couch and heading towards the cupboard “Pretty sure we tried to talk to ghosts when we were kids too.”  
“Yeah, well, I think I know what I’m doing this time.” Elliot carefully cleared the kitchen table, and Brent brought over the candles he had, and arranged them haphazardly before turning the lights off. The two men sat across from each other, and Elliot couldn’t remember if he held hands with the Waits, but he reached across the table for Brent. What did Josh say to bring his grandfather back? “Please, Drew, Arnold, guys… speak to us. Come back.”  
Brent was about to give up hope, but Elliot’s belief pulled through. The two boys, looking just as they last had seen them, manifested in Brent’s kitchenette.  
“Oh my God!” they said in unison, standing up to reunite with their friends.  
“We were so young,” Brent choked up on seeing the teenagers, the weight of what had happened hitting him all over again.  
“I’m so sorry!” Elliot cried, dropping to his knees in front of the apparitions “I’m so fucking sorry, guys.”  
“You didn’t know there was going to be goblins, Elliot,” Arnold reached over and patted his shoulder.  
“I knew there wouldn’t be girls,” Elliot confessed “I shouldn’t have asked you to come with me.”  
“We should have known a town too small to be on the map wouldn’t have any girls,” Drew shrugged, defeated.  
“I saw a girl,” Arnold told them “she got eaten by goblins.”  
“What was a real girl doing out in that hellhole?” Drew asked. Arnold shrugged.  
“What happened to you guys?” Brent asked them “They never found your bodies.”  
“Well, I tried to help that girl, but I got speared. We kept running and some kind of witch tricked us into drinking this green shit. Girl turned into a pile of green slop, and I turned into a tree,” Arnold told them.  
“Yeah, I saw him like that,” Drew added “I was on my way to town and a police officer offered me a sandwich, then a shopkeeper gave me some gross milk, and they told me where you were Arnold, but by the time I got there, I was so sick… then that witch chainsawed Arnold to death right in front of me, and I could feel my body disintegrating… it was bad.”  
“Damn corn witch!” Brent cursed.  
“Her name is Creedence,” Elliot reminded, but the other two had seen the corn incident from the afterlife. They only had ten minutes though, and they weren’t going to spend it making fun of Brent.  
“I can’t believe you tried to tried to tap that,” Arnold said. Nevermind.  
“You could see us?” Elliot asked.  
“Yeah. I’ve been checking in on you guys since we died,” Drew confirmed.  
“Divorce Holly, man, you can do better than that,” Arnold gave Elliot a light punch to the shoulder.  
This time, faced with the death toll of his misguided romance, Elliot nodded with more certainty. “I’m sorry I put you guys through that. I didn’t… I didn’t love her like I did you guys. I thought it was normal, just something I had to overcome to grow up. But she was pushing me, and controlling me, it wasn’t right. She always wanted to be with me regardless of what her father said, but she wouldn’t let me be with you guys, it was so hypocritical! She hit me for Christ’s sake! I’m so, so sorry.”  
As if on cue, the other three moved in for a group hug around Elliot, a rare sincere moment facilitated by the ticking clock.  
“We know,” Drew told him “you wanted us there because you didn’t think you could spend a whole week with her, huh?”  
Elliot nodded, trying to reach his arms around all of them at once.  
“You’ve done a damn good job, sticking through it for thirty years then, Jesus,” Arnold nudged him, and the hug split “I’m joking, but uh, nice job with the kids and career, that sort of thing.”  
“Yeah, we’re like, proud of you. I wish we could have stayed, so fucking much, and I wish you guys could have kept in touch, but, like… I think I’m okay now,” Drew told them “I think it’s like, sage ghost shit, but, whatever. I know you feel bad, and like, we forgive you.”  
Arnold nodded in agreement.  
Elliot and Brent pulled the kids in for another hug. It felt too short.  
“Hey,” Drew got their attentions “Here’s a sandwich.”  
And with that, Drew and Arnold left to the afterlife, forever, leaving Brent and Elliot a bologna sandwich each. Brent didn’t get the reference, but he was crying so he didn’t ask.

Elliot thought he’d been dreaming, but slowly the reality set in that he was not in his own bed, and it was not Holly there beside him. He was in no rush to get up, having just promised a divorce to some ghost children. He looked over at Brent. This was not the first time they’d slept in the same bed; it was pretty normal for them when they were kids. His parents tried to talk him out of it when they were young teenagers, and he knew why. Same reason Holly didn’t like it.  
Same reason he did.  
He wasn’t sure of it when he was a kid, but as he got older, he went into denial, then some form of false acceptance before they’d died. He’d always hoped that being with Holly would make him straight, or at least appear to be. But she always seemed to see right through it. His stomach twisted, thinking about what would happen after their divorce. He was living in a different time than he was when he married a woman. He could legally marry a man now, even if it would upset his parents. He almost considered trying for a secret gay lifestyle until they died but remembered that ghosts were real. Their happiness was incompatible. His thoughts moved to how his children would take the split, but when Brent stirred, he was gay again.  
“How’re you feeling?” Brent asked him, sleepily.  
“I’ve got a lot to think about,” Elliot admitted, pretending to be sleepier than he was.  
Brent groaned and sat up, covers slipping off his bare chest. “I’d bet.”  
Elliot rubbed his face with his hands.  
“You wanna talk about it?” Brent asked, rolling over on his side to face him.  
Elliot did. He settled back down, rolling too. “There’s all the ghost stuff, and finding you again, and the divorce… none of it seems real. There’s the house, the kids, the… loneliness, I guess. Like, I don’t love Holly, but I do, you know? She’s my partner. It’s going to be a big adjustment. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”  
“Get your fly ass on Tinder,” Brent joked “find a better woman.”  
Elliot hesitated. This was a bad time, but he wanted to live his truth, and the conversation was in the right place.  
Brent could have beat him to the punch, and he let him know with the way his expression changed. His smile faded, and his gaze softened.  
“… God, this is the worst situation to say this in, I’m sorry, I just… well this is just what we always did,” Elliot motioned to the bed “and we just found each other again, but I guess… I should get it out of the way. I think I'm gay, and have been this whole time.”  
Elliot tensed up about as much as Brent relaxed on his admission. Brent nodded “that’s cool, I’m bi. I’ve been out a while, to be honest.”  
“… I probably should have noticed the pride flag on your wall.”  
“It was dark.”  
Elliot laughed a bit, then felt himself slowly relaxing, but he was shaking, and teary-eyed again. “Thanks.”  
Brent could sense the turmoil in the other, and reached over, hugging him tightly to his chest, in what he assumed would be a futile attempt to shoulder some of the burden. He assumed wrong, and Elliot held him for a long time.

“So you’re leaving.” Joshua sat across the table from Elliot, after a long silence, Holly storming out of the house, and a lot of yelling.  
“Sorry to do this here Josh. I just can’t go on like this.”  
“That’s okay, it’s your choice.”  
“Thanks, bud…” Elliot sighed, and sat a while longer “Hey. I know you don’t like talking about it, but I don’t think I’m going to be around so much from now on, so...”  
Joshua tensed. There was only one topic that was brought up so delicately.  
“Brent and I did a séance. We managed to talk to our friends who died. They each told me about what happened to them. I don’t know if that means anything to you, but I just wanted to thank you for everything you did that day. Those of us who survived couldn’t have done it without you, you were a brave kid.”  
His face was covered with his hands, but he was nodding. Elliot wished he could say something more to help him, but he stood up, gave his former brother-in-law a strong pat on the shoulder, and left to grab his suitcase. If Holly wasn’t going to bring their car back, he may as well walk. Michael glowered at him as he left his house. He’d always known that boy was good for nothing.

Elliot was nervous to stay with Brent during the divorce. Sure, they’d had a moment, but were they ready to resume their friendship?  
He remembered that day to reassure himself months later as they pulled into the street where their new home was. Looking into the rear view mirror, he could see the sign for Llort Street.  
“Brent, honey, this can’t be the place.”  
“Haha, I’m kidding,” he leaned over and kissed his boyfriend on the mouth “it’s a couple blocks over.”  
“Asshole…”

The trolls in the bushes watched as the two men kept driving away, safe from danger.


End file.
